James Patton Anderson

James Patton Anderson (16 February 1822-20 September 1872) was a Major General of the Confederate States Army.

Biography
Anderson was born in Winchester in Franklin County, Tennessee. In 1831 he moved to Kentucky and he attended Jefferson College to study medicine, but a family financial problem forced him to leave shortly before graduation in 1842. At Montrose Law School he studied to become a lawyer and in 1843 he was admitted to the bar, and he lived in DeSoto County, Mississippi, and he became a Captain in the militia during the Mexican-American War in 1846. He fought in the 2nd Mississippi Rifles Battalion during the war in Mexico and left service in July 1848, joining the House of Representatives and working as a gold prospector and later a Marshal for the Washington Territory under the Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who appointed him due to his service in the same battalion. Just prior to the American Civil War, he had been appointed a Captain in the Florida state militia, and after Florida seceded, Anderson joined them as an officer of the Confederate States.

On 10 February 1862, having served under Braxton Bragg in the Army of Pensacola, he was promoted to Brigadier-General and fought under Bragg in Tennessee in the Battle of Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and the Battle of Chattanooga. In February 1864 he reached the rank of Brigadier General and briefly commanded the Confederate army in Florida before serving in the Atlanta Campaign, suffering a mortal jaw wound in the Battle of Jonesboro. On 1 May 1865 he surrendered to the Union Army in North Carolina and after the war sold insurance and worked as an editor of a newspaper. He died of his wounds in 1870, received five years earlier.